Josiah R. Daniels

The term “woke” has become something of an anathema in recent years. Those on the Right use “woke” to disparage anything they think of as social justice or political correctness. Those on the Left initially deployed the term to describe a person who was socially conscious, but after it became apparent that banks and corporations were adopting “woke” coded language, and that the semantics of “wokeism” were more performative than substantive, “woke” fell out of vogue.

I’d wager that whether you are new to Sojourners or a longtime subscriber, you probably have a deep admiration for the late Salvadoran archbishop and liberation theologian, St. Óscar Romero. And if you don’t, then you’re about to.

A favorite movie of mine growing up was the 1999 cartoon Our Friend, Martin. It combines two of the subjects I love most: time travel and Martin Luther King Jr. The main character, Miles, a Black sixth grader, visits the childhood home of King and ends up traveling back in time to meet King at various stages of his life. Miles, who was largely unaware of King before time traveling, eventually learns that King was assassinated. In order to prevent this, Miles convinces his new friend Martin to come to the future with him. And while that decision spares King’s life, the movie makes it clear that Miles saving his friend’s life would prevent the racial equality we now enjoy in the U.S.

In the modern U.S., are we really enjoying a post-King racial equality?

For a long time, I’ve wondered how, on a practical level, something like mass deportations would work. Specifically, I’ve wondered how churches providing shelter to immigrants will respond if and when Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents show up to deport people seeking refuge. What can faith communities, activists, and people of conscience do to tangibly help immigrants right now?

D. Danyelle Thomas, the digital pastor of Unfit Christian and the author of The Day That God Saw Me as Black, also finds theological meaning in fiction. One of the conversation partners for her book is the literature of Toni Morrison. I love Morrison because her characters are often struggling with life’s deepest theological questions while also proudly asserting that they are Black and beautiful. Thomas articulated this idea in her own words, saying, “I don’t navigate this world without my Blackness, so I certainly won’t navigate my relationship with God without it.”

I contain multiple identities. On the one hand, I am a Black man whose ancestors were enslaved, then pushed into ghettos, and now exploited through the unjust prison labor system. On the other hand, I am living on the stolen land of the Duwamish people. I can’t escape the colonial history of the U.S. and its reverberating effects.

There are times when I try to convince myself that, because I am a Black person living in the U.S., it’s not my responsibility to wrestle with the legacy of colonialism and how I might be a beneficiary of that history. However, after my conversation with author and activist Patty Krawec, I am convinced that I need to view myself through a more complicated lens.

PERCIVAL EVERETT’S NOVEL James is something of a spiritual successor and corrective companion to Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. When I learned that Everett, who is a fan of Twain’s work, was writing a novel from the perspective of Twain’s character, “N----- Jim,” I knew it’d be a must-read (note: Twain and Everett print the censored word in full). But I decided to read Adventures of Huckleberry Finn first, and while not necessary before reading James, I’m glad I did.

Everett’s novel is set during the time leading up to the Civil War. When James discovers that he’ll be sold and separated from his wife and daughter, he runs away; he eventually runs into Huckleberry Finn, who has faked his own death to escape his abusive father. James and Huck form an alliance and begin making their way down the Mississippi River. This is a perilous journey, both because of the precarity of the river and because of the thing that continues to haunt the United States: race. James is a slave, and so he is raced as Black; Huck, a pubescent prankster, is free and so he is raced as white. But these designations ultimately obscure the human connection between the two characters and their respective groups.

Editor’s note: A version of this article first appeared on sojo.net on Jan. 9, 2024 as “What DEI Trainings and Evangelical Retreats Have in Common.”

JONATHAN TRAN TELLS a story he encountered while researching his book Asian Americans and the Spirit of Racial Capitalism, about Chinese immigrants who lived in the Mississippi Delta during the Reconstruction period. After the Civil War, Tran says, white people not only prevented Black people from living in certain neighborhoods and attending schools with their white children — they discriminated similarly against people of Chinese descent.

But dissimilar to the Delta’s Black population, the Chinese immigrants were able to open modest grocery stores, which allowed them to accumulate wealth thanks to Black patronage. In this way, the Delta Chinese immigrants saw their material conditions improve — but this improvement came under a system of white supremacy, which necessitated the exclusion of the Delta’s Black population.

Tran tells this story to demonstrate the ways that capitalism and white supremacy have become intertwined. In a nod to the Black radical tradition, Tran refers to this system as racial capitalism. The account also demonstrates Tran’s commitment to storytelling. He doesn’t explain the negative effects of racial capitalism in a removed or abstract way; rather, he leans into the complicated histories that have pitted racially marginalized groups against one another.

Tran, an associate dean of Baylor University’s Honors College and an associate professor of theology, understands how stories are influenced by material reality — which is why, for Tran, criticism of racism that does not also include a critique of the capitalist system is wrong-headed. But Tran doesn’t just critique racial capitalism or anti-racist enterprises that avoid economics. Tran believes that Christian theology offers an alternative story to racial capitalism, one that finds its locus in the “divine economy.”

Tran talked with sojo.net associate opinion editor Josiah R. Daniels last fall about Christian theology, anti-racism, W.E.B. Du Bois, and what it means to live into a reconstructed reality. — The Editors

Brenda Salter McNeil is an ordained minister in the Evangelical Covenant Church, associate professor of reconciliation studies at Seattle Pacific University, and the author of multiple books on the topic of racial reconciliation. McNeil is acutely aware of critical attitudes toward racial reconciliation and is seeking to emphasize the importance of reparations and intersectionality in her new book, Empowered to Repair. I sat down with McNeil to talk about reconciliation, Obama, and Black support for former president Donald J. Trump.